Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 18 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:18

وَلَقَدْ كَذَّبَ ٱلَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلِهِمْ فَكَيْفَ كَانَ نَكِيرِ

“And already had those before them denied, and how [terrible] was My reproach.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Nations before them made the same charge and fell short of the truth; the question asked is about the answer, not about them.

A reflection

Civilisations fit inside a relative clause

A peat cutter working a bank finds worked timber in the face. Squared, pegged, cut by somebody. Below it, under more peat, there is charcoal and a hearth stone. Nobody knows the name of the family that sat round it, or what they called the hill, or what they were proud of. The spade goes through four hundred years in an afternoon.

This line does the same thing in six words. Those before them denied. That is all the room they get. One commentary lists them: the people of Noah, 'Ad, Thamud, the people of Lot, Midian, al-Rass, the court of Pharaoh. The ayah itself does not. They are a relative clause. Everything they built, every grievance they nursed, every argument they thought devastating, sits in a phrase that takes two seconds to recite.

One commentary makes an observation here that is easy to miss, and it changes the weight of the sentence. The emphatic opening, the oath-like insistence, is not on their denying. It falls on the second half. The sentence is sworn to on the question how was My reproach. Their crime is background. He is the subject.

That is where the ego loses its footing, if it is being honest. We assume we are the main clause of our own story, and that God is the response to us. The grammar has it the other way round. You are the circumstance. He is the verb. Nothing about that is cold, because the One acting is the same One who has been holding the ground still under you all day. But the arrogance that treats the universe as an argument we are winning cannot survive this. Look how much space the last argument took up in the record.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.